In an interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her role in the 1974 black feminist group the Combahee River Collective, Demita Frazier remembers herself as a “wild card” and quips that “comedy will save us all!” (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 124). Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai add that “comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us’” (2017, 235). Linda Mizejewski's Pretty/Funny demonstrates that women's comedy has become a primary site where “feminism speaks, talks back, and is contested” (Reference Mizejewski2014, 6).
Today's female comedians—Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Ali Wong, Jessica Williams, Lena Dunham, to name only a few—unabashedly employ the “subversive force of feminist humor” (Willet and Willet Reference Willet, Willet, Crasnow and Waugh2013, 16) to make “disruptive spectacle(s)” of themselves (Karlyn Reference Karlyn1995, 31). They eagerly abandon the constraints of modeling positive behavior, and they refuse to buttress and perpetuate erotic attraction to toned, white, slender bodies on the part of spectators. Podcasts and comedic television series with central female roles, such as Two Dope Queens, Broad City, and Girls, achieve comedic impact through the use of irony as they model body diversity and explore sexual shame. They share humiliating (and what some would deem politically incorrect, inappropriate, or tawdry) stories and situations with the audience and each other. Ali Wong, for example, parades her very pregnant body onstage in her Netflix special Baby Cobra (2016) as she announces that she tricked her boyfriend into marrying her so that she would not have to work. Undermining public goals of feminism and evoking sexist stereotypes simultaneously, Wong says she does not want to “lean in”; she wants to “lie down.” These kinds of statements, coming from the mouths of unruly bodies, can evoke the cringe not only of the critic but also of the feminist. Some critics might cringe (possibly even as they laugh) at Wong's wordplay with racial stereotypes and her lowbrow body humor. Feminists might cringe because we wonder about the effect of Wong's performance on female audiences and the political upshot for feminism. While we may well criticize the corporate capitalist advice to “lean in” (Sandberg Reference Sandberg2013), do we want to encourage women to “lie down”?
Comedy is dangerous, and maybe especially so for feminists, who are too often said to be humorless and not often enough “in on” the joke. Just as we might not want to explore what, why, and how something turns us on, we also worry about what makes us laugh. I borrow the term “feminist cringe comedy” from New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum (2017) to name a genre that features female fantasy in a comedic register. I make the case that feminist cringe comedy makes visible a version of what I call “feminism's realisms”—a realism that features sex from the perspective of female desire rather than the perspective of the male gaze. Cringe comedies are, at their heart, paradoxical. Cringing is a bodily posture of turning inward, and laughter is an affect that opens us to others.Footnote 1 To cringe and laugh at the same time is an uncontrollable, disruptive response, a spectator reaction that exposes our collective investments in gendered fantasies. Cringe comedies that explore sexual desire are doubly dangerous, and the reactions I explore—laughter and the cringe—are neither always predictable nor predictably feminist.
Within this dangerous territory lies the possibility to expose the male fantasy gaze that is too often replicated in visual culture. Like sexual desire, comedy tests us: “always crossing lines, it helps us figure out what we desire or can bear” (Berlant and Ngai Reference Berlant and Ngai2017, 235). What should we make of women's sexual desires under patriarchy, varied and impure and unruly as they are, and made especially risky when made into a joke?
In this essay, I position Jill Soloway's adaptation of Chris Kraus's I Love Dick, an eight-episode Amazon television series released in May 2017, as building on the work of French feminist auteur/director Catherine Breillat. I Love Dick echoes the themes, style, and intent of several of the films of Breillat, in particular her 1999 film Romance. Like Breillat, Soloway uses dark comedy about sexual desire to undermine male fantasy and male power. Feminist cringe comedies like theirs are divisive. They are funny for some (but—and this is key—not for all) partly because of their bodily politics: they make us cringe, and the cringe is evoked by not knowing whether we should be laughing. I am drawn to the work of directors such as Soloway and Breillat because of their explicit mix of desire and comedy and their willingness to put bodies at the center of their feminism.
Although my title indicates that the joke is on Dick (and on patriarchy, and on all dicks in general), I Love Dick creates (and dispels) anxiety for feminists, an anxiety that I will argue is productive for feminist politics. Feminist visual culture that departs from “positive” representation by refusing the use of inspiring role models and predictably progressive narratives has been controversially received by feminist (and other) critics, even though it is pitched as an appeal to female spectators.Footnote 2 From the perspective of some critics, the sex employed in cringe comedies is too degrading, too pornographic, and too fantastical, and the female characters are flawed or damaged for wanting it. Nussbaum (Reference Nussbaum2017) says, for example, that I Love Dick is “not infrequently repulsive, a narcissistic spectacle framed as a liberating vision quest.” I show that cringe comedy does not cross the line into politically vicious forms of expression, but this is an aesthetic and political claim; indeed, it is a feminist claim. The perspectives that are privileged, the work of the camera, and the context and themes frame the humor as opening up new paths to freedom as opposed to closing them down. Moreover, they do so in innovative ways rather than the tried and true ways that are considered “politically correct”; they break these and other rules, in the process drawing our attention to them. Nussbaum's charge of narcissism (a criticism also leveled at the characters portrayed in Girls and in Sex and the City before that) is belied by the obvious creation of community.Footnote 3 The bodily cringe that accompanies our laughter might itself be material evidence that the joke is doing its subversive work.
In what follows, I explore how cringe comedies interrupt male fantasies to stage everyday sex and the expression of desire from women's perspectives, calling the latter “feminist realism.” I argue that the legitimacy or veracity of female fantasies and the credibility of female spectators is undermined by critics who do not see the sex as real, who deem it narcissistic or politically incorrect, or are ashamed or undone by their own (and others') laughter.Footnote 4 Aesthetic strategies employed by feminist cringe comedies make space for women's fantasies and make them felt by spectators as real. I conclude that the laughter that erupts in response to the sharing of women's fantasies by letters to Dick and in direct appeal to spectators, especially when this laughter is accompanied by a cringe, might yet free us all.Footnote 5
To make this argument, I rely on Luce Irigaray's and Simone de Beauvoir's insistence that the body is central to politics. Irigaray is well known for writing philosophy and politics from the perspective of female desire. Although Beauvoir is often criticized for disdaining the body, and in particular the female body, her consistent call to acknowledge ambiguity—the ontological fact that we are simultaneously both self and other—and to recognize the centrality of encounters to politics—the fact that we can only experience freedom in relationship to others—put the body front and center in her political thinking. As I will argue in the final section of this article, Irigaray's focus on female sexual desire and Beauvoir's somatic politics of encounter (Marso Reference Marso2017) helps us see that male fantasies about women shape everyone's material reality and infect our collective and individual fantasies. We can interrupt these visions by making visible various forms of female desire under patriarchy. Feminist cringe comedies do just that.
REAL SEX
“Becoming a woman really does not seem to be an easy business. At least on the stage that has been set by the fantasies, phobias, and taboos a man … has about woman's sexuality.”
—Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman ([Reference Irigaray and Gill1974] Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 39)Irigaray reminds us that life's stage has always been set (as well as peopled, directed, ruled, judged) by men. Sometimes life's stage is set by reasonable or benevolent men (still: they are men, ruling over women), but ugly and malevolent male fantasies, fears, and anxieties always lurk just beneath the surface. As we know from Volume I of Beauvoir's The Second Sex, male fantasies are the real, and, as we learn in Volume II, male fantasies permeate female desire and serve to structure women's experiences. Even the “data” of biology are shaped in response to male anxieties caused by the indeterminacy and contingency of sexual difference in nature.Footnote 6 Realism, and maybe particularly “real” desire, is not simply a neutral or objective or accurate presentation of what is “real” but always involves fantasy, struggle, interpretation, politics, and perspective. Bonnie Honig and Marc Stears describe realism in politics this way: “If realism means a commitment to describing what we see, then surely realists must concede that politics includes violence and consensus, agreement and strife, murderousness and reasonableness. Real politics shows we are incited by political engagement into rationality and violence, practicality and fantasy, war and solidarity” (Reference Honig, Stears, Floyd and Stears2011, 177).
Like the political realisms that Honig and Stears describe, what I am naming “feminism's realisms” include political struggle over the interpretation of bodies and the meaning of sexual difference in what we acknowledge as real. Feminism's realisms stage crises of interpretation over sexualized and racialized bodies, women's claims to credibility, and women's access to public voice and visibility. Feminist realisms focus our attention on the contingencies, complications, multiplicities, and surfaces of daily life from the perspective of these struggles, the effect they have on bodies, and how they situate encounters from intimate to structural to historical. As such, my category of feminist realism does not claim one truth or an unchallenged vision of what is, but rather shows that contestations of the real are integral to representing the real.
Cinematic examples of feminist realism are especially pertinent to the staging of contestation and debate as they continually remind viewers that cinema belies “realism's aspiration to certainty” (Mulvey Reference Mulvey2006, 10). As an aesthetic medium, visual culture bears witness to “the elusive nature of reality and its representations” (10) by reminding viewers of artificiality and materiality (e.g., through jump cuts, staging, the physical presence of spectators and of actors/performers). Feminist visual realisms further foreground the construction and manipulation of reality by engaging formal techniques that remind us that we are watching a staged cinematic version of events. Yet feminist realism aspires to show “real” life from the perspective of women. This is a reality that has been obscured and distorted, sometimes erased altogether from the stage, as observed by Irigaray.
What is “real” from women's perspective, however, is often obscured by a male gaze, and this is a particularly acute problem in visual culture. Laura Mulvey, referenced earlier for her insights into how spectator attention is called to the construction of reality, is best known for her pioneering work on the male gaze. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey (Reference Mulvey1989) argues that Hollywood film conventions are predicated on, as well as reproduce, the male gaze as subject and the female body as object. I Love Dick and Romance before it reference and respond to this history by deliberately subverting formal mechanisms of cinema that repeat and reiterate the male gaze. Liz Constable notices that in Romance, Breillat “embeds her cinematic representations of women's sexual subjectivity in a network of other representations of women as sexual subjects seen and interpreted by male directors: Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris (1963) [Contempt], Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (1976) [In the Realm of the Senses], and Pedro Almodovar's Matador (1985)” (Reference Constable2004, 684). I Love Dick departs from the male gaze altogether to go full-on gynocentric. Soloway's episodes are cleverly interlaced with images from feminist film and video art, including the work of Chantal Akerman, Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, Jane Campion, Sally Potter, and Naomi Uman (see Frank Reference Frank2017). In this article, I treat I Love Dick as a reception (of sorts) of Romance, although (ironically) Breillat is one of the important feminist directors not referenced in the series.
Despite Soloway's omission of Breillat as a key foremother of feminist cinema, Breillat's version of feminist realism draws my attention as I view I Love Dick. Mizejewski notes that “in the historic binary of ‘pretty’ versus ‘funny,’ women comics, no matter what they look like, have been located in opposition to ‘pretty,’ enabling them to engage in a transgressive comedy grounded in the female body—its looks, its race and sexuality, and its relationships to ideal versions of femininity” (2014, 5). Both Romance and I Love Dick stage body politics that go even further: they each challenge our too-easy, too-comfortable assumptions about female sexual desire, whether it should be celebrated (sex positive) or hidden (protected, saved from violation), and how it can be (tastefully, correctly, nonpornographically) explored.
In Breillat's Romance, Marie goes on a sexual adventure when her boyfriend refuses to have sex with her. One of her partners onscreen, a stranger from a bar, is in real life an Italian porn star (Rocco Siffredi); another is a stranger in a stairwell; and yet another, her boss who teaches her the ropes (literally) of sadomasochism. Marie's desire takes her to some dark places, leads her toward what might be considered debasement and humiliation, and yet Marie never loses her flat affect and her detached way of observing herself and her absurd situation, observations that she shares directly with the audience through voice-overs.
Chris, the protagonist of I Love Dick (who, importantly, is significantly older than Marie of Romance) insists on going wherever her midlife libido takes her. Chris's desire (sexual, aesthetic) steers her toward Dick, a man she barely knows and does not care to know—at least not in any way other than sexually—and her sexual obsession and aesthetic ambition merge. Does she want to have sex with Dick, be Dick, replace Dick, obliterate Dick? She gleefully humiliates herself by explaining her erotic fantasies (addressed to Dick) in detailed letters that she plasters all over town. At one point, Chris says that when she walks down the street, she looks into the faces of the women she meets and wonders about the history of her desire. She asks, “Dear Dick, What if we all started writing you letters?” What if, indeed.
If so, we might have a world that foregrounds the politics in sex, as Breillat's films do. Breillat consistently violates rules about showing sex on screen (courting X ratings),Footnote 7 while also blurring boundaries between fantasy and the real. She often succeeds in eroding spectator confidence in the difference between eroticism and pornography, as well as between fantasy and what is real. We can say that Breillat's films are “realist” in the sense that her subject is real sex, but how the sex is real, and to whom, is her question. How can we know? Women, it is said, are unreliable narrators. In the “he said, she said” battle, what he said most often prevails. Women cannot be counted on to distinguish reality from fantasy. Anita Hill fantasized about the obscene attention of Clarence Thomas, did she not? This is a problem with a history. Working with hysterics, Sigmund Freud traced the cause of their symptoms—that is, the physical problems with their bodies—to an overactive imagination. Here is Freud quoted by Irigaray: “In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me they had been seduced by their father … I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences” ([Reference Irigaray and Gill1974] Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 37). Irigaray locates the source of this fantasy with Freud himself—Freud, father of psychoanalysis, who seduces his students, and on and on, until the seduction is covered up by the law known as the Oedipus complex in women. Irigaray concludes, “Law organizes and arranges the world of fantasy at least as much as it forbids, interprets, and symbolizes it” (38).
Another way to put it: Breillat calls our attention to the fact that to some spectators, sex from a woman's perspective looks and feels real; to others, it looks and feels fantastical. What looks like horror or the extreme to some male viewers might look to women like everyday experience. What looks like ordinary sex to men might look like and feel like porn to women. Perspective aside, when Breillat is filming sex that actually happens, rather than sex that women imagine, she opts for a realist technique. She does not use swelling music, fadeaway camera movement, soft focus, zoom shots, or other romance-inducing devices. Eschewing these conventional tricks that add affect and emotion to sex—that is, that make actual sex look like fantasy—Breillat gives us the mechanics of body parts, their interactions and actions: the erect penis, the limp penis, the vagina, anal and oral sex, even a live birth. She films real sex without enhancement. In contrast, the fantasies she puts on screen are those that arouse her female characters, particularly her young women. But these meet a dead end, a diminished arousal, when they come into contact with male desire, with male indifference.
While the perspective of women dominates in Breillat's films, perhaps ironically, that perspective is undermined by critics and spectators who doubt its veracity. Controversies regarding Breillat's films (and there are many) seem to always circle back to realism and perspective, raising the question of legitimacy and veracity. Where critics and spectators stand on the questions of what offends, what resonates, and whether Breillat is “extreme” or “realist” most often depends on situation and experience. Some ask, for instance, whether Breillat's images and narratives not only intensify but even glorify the degradation, risk, and abuse of sex and sexual politics for women. For many men, it is not the realism of the sex that appears extreme but instead the up-close view of a baby emerging from Marie's vagina at the end of Breillat's ironically titled Romance. For antiporn feminists, Breillat's filming of rape and female sexual submission unwittingly or too willingly replicates the cinematic male gaze. For others, female masochism, pain, hunger, and anger resonate, sometimes too sharply.
However differently situated—politically, socially, sexually, or experientially—critics and viewers report leaving Breillat's films feeling unsettled, maybe unhinged. I categorize Breillat's films as early versions of contemporary cringe comedy, not only because of her focus on real sex that evokes the cringe but also because so much of what Breillat does is flat-out hilarious (although, as noted, some spectators might not be in on the joke or may disavow their laughter). But always, Breillat's characters invite us to be in on the joke by speaking directly to the audience, through voice-overs and through the direct recounting of (often excessive, absurd, unreal) experiences.
Eugenie Brinkema, an insightful critic of Breillat's work, calls Breillat's fascination with the materiality of flesh, particularly of “wet female desire,” a foray into the “ontological realism of the image” (2006, 149). But what realism is that? Female wetness is a biological response. A “truth” of the female body that is usually kept hidden is boldly shown on film by Breillat. But spectators are still left wondering about its origins and its meaning. Wetness is referenced several times in I Love Dick, but the source and meaning of it is left as a puzzle (to be solved later) for viewers. Mulvey reminds us that images in cinema belie “realism's aspiration to certainty”; they bear witness to “the elusive nature of reality and its representations” (2006, 10). I contend that rather than focus on the look of “wet female desire” (Brinkema Reference Brinkema2006), what invokes what we might call “the real” in Breillat's films and what Soloway picks up on in I Love Dick is the invocation of a particular kind of affective response in the bodies of female spectators: the cringe and (sometimes involuntary) irruption of laughter. Feminist realism of the sort that I am exploring here is precisely about giving up the “truth” of female desire in favor of exploring, enhancing, and displaying its reality—as caught between these fantasy worlds of the male gaze and women's experience. The cringe and the laughter are responses to seeing women's everyday sexual experience (whether shared or not with spectators) portrayed on screen. These experiences give voice and visual reality to the fact that the reckoning with the meaning that men make of sexual difference is violent, horrific, and extreme, but that women's fantasies, often very funny and in these cases excessive, offer a release in laughter and maybe a way forward despite (or as I will claim, because of) our acknowledgment of the cringe.
FEMALE FANTASIES
I Love Dick is an epistolary romance. The series opens with a red screen filled with large white letters: “Dear Dick, Every letter is a love letter.” With these words, we are immediately situated on the terrain of desire, female heterosexual (for the most part) desire, with its arousal and its object located in the letters. The words, the lust, overwhelmingly, gushingly, spill off the page as Chris Kraus (Kathryn Hahn) writes letter after letter to Dick (Kevin Bacon). Chris is a frustrated filmmaker who accompanies her older, Holocaust scholar husband Sylvère (Griffin Dunne) to Marfa, Texas, where she is called “the Holocaust wife.” The Marfa Retreat is a place for writers and artists to “read, write, or think.” It is run by Dick, a man whose aesthetic vision and brooding, brilliant, bad-boy personality dominates and structures the town and absorbs its inhabitants. When we first meet Chris and Sylvère, we learn that Chris plans to drop Sylvère at Marfa and then travel to Venice, where her feminist film is scheduled to premiere. Instead, she gets news that her film is out of the competition because of a copyright issue on some music she used. She is stymied not by patriarchy but by her own stupid mistake. She is left bored, anxious, angry, and adrift in Marfa. But then she sees Dick riding down the middle of a deserted street on a horse, and this gets her artistic and other juices flowing.
Chris's desire spills off the screen as we watch her thinking of Dick, returning to her laptop as feelings course through her fingertips. Over dinner between Dick, Chris, and Sylvère, Dick flippantly says to Chris that desire, “pure want,” if she has it, should be enough for her film to succeed.Footnote 8 Clearly Dick does not think her desire is real, or not real in a way that either fits in or transforms. Chris responds, “If all it took was desire, Dick, there would be a trove of amazing films by women filmmakers.” Dick interrupts, “Unfortunately most films made by women aren't that good … See I think it's pretty rare for a woman to make a good film because they have to work from behind their oppression which makes for some bummer movies.” Chris retreats to the women's bathroom to regain her composure. We see Chris look at herself in the mirror in the first bathroom shot; in the second, we see the red background and the white lettering of her letters once again: “Dear Dick, Game On.”
It comes as no surprise to feminists that the game is rigged. Beauvoir tells us that “the conditions under which woman's sexual life unfolds depend not only on these facts [that women have to struggle with cultural scripts that ascribe shame, passivity, and lack of pleasure to female subjects] but also on her whole social and economic situation” ([Reference de Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier1949] Reference de Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 415). I Love Dick’s Chris is a well-situated white woman who finds her aesthetic, sexual, romantic ambitions at a dead end and decides to try to live a more satisfying sexual and artistic life. In episode 5, aptly titled “A Short History of Weird Girls,” the picture widens to include a diverse group of women who reside in Marfa and are themselves influenced by Chris's transformation. Subsequent transformations begin because the women of Marfa read the address (the recipients, or addressee, as well as the destination) as mobile. Is Chris addressing Dick, addressing patriarchy, or addressing other women? When the women of Marfa see Chris's letters all over town, they cringe, they laugh, and they start to move differently.
This episode opens with a clip from Naomi Uman's film Removed, created in 1999, the year Romance premiered. To make the short film, Uman replaced the women in pornographic films with bleach and nail polish applied directly to the film itself. The material result is that the women appear as white bubbles. From the perspective of omnipotent male desire, woman has “nothing you can see” (Irigaray [Reference Irigaray and Gill1974] Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 47). But Soloway's gaze is not from the perspective of male desire, and so she sees something. We follow the “histories of desire” for Devon, the butch lesbian who was born in Marfa, resides in a trailer next to Chris and Sylvère, and aspires to be a playwright; Paula, the black assistant curator of Dick's museum space; and Toby, a brilliant young redhead who is also a fellow of the institute and works on the aesthetics of pornography. Echoing Uman's film, the images from the past, narrated by each woman in turn, position each woman's former self as a white bubble. And yet each woman's desire is there in the narration, visible to the spectator because it is brought to life by hearing each tell her own story from her perspective. Each story is also a story of Dick: Dick is omnipresent but surpassed by the telling.
Paula, the curator, starts by recalling her love for her mother. She describes it as a love story. We might be forgiven for thinking at first that this will be a narrative of the restoration of the mother-daughter bond, the return to origins urged by Irigaray: a way for mothers to be seen. But then, disappointment: for Paula, for spectators. Seeing the string from a tampon between her mother's legs, Paula turns away and searches for a new object. At this point, she turns toward Dick. She says it is because he leaves his works untitled, leaving an empty space for ambiguity, for “boundlessness.” But working with Dick, she now finds the thing that attracted her to him—his lethargic and mysterious aura—in real life means that he will not say yes to any of her ideas, particularly those that involve displaying the work of feminist artists. In a later episode, Dick gives up on Marfa, and Paula takes over the Marfa studio. She fills it with the work of black and female artists.
Devon, who remarks that her family tries to politely ignore the fact that they (brown folk of Texas) have worked Dick's land for decades, aspires to be Dick. She pretends to be him when her cousins want to practice kissing, and she copies his swagger and style. But then Devon sees Dick exiting the bedroom of her mother. In subsequent episodes, we see Devon inspired by Chris. Chris's letters inspire her, too. Devon is able to make a breakthrough in writing a play that had been stymied earlier; she also acts on her desire for Toby, another Marfa resident, and though their lesbian encounter mirrors patriarchy (Toby wants to suck Devin's “big cock”), it disrupts it, too. Likewise, Devon experiences an emancipation of her desire through mirroring the construction workers’ movements in a ritual she choreographs, performed with men. My claim is not that she has found her true desire but that there is something more real about it for her. Realism here is about displaying what our desire is (structured by things we do not necessarily like, but also the idiosyncratic and particular), and by displaying it, making it more real than it was before.
Toby's story betrays her sexual history: the too often repeated sexual history of the many hysterics who trekked through Freud's offices. Her hippie father touched her because he could, but he also owned a coffee table book of Dick's work: all “massive steel and concrete cock.” Toby wants to be an artist too; her PhD in art history examined the aesthetics but avoided the politics of pornographic images. Toby counts on formalism to change the world, but she knows that content counts, too. She learned that there are “500 times as many female nudes in art history textbooks as female artists.” At the end of her story, after citing Dick's accomplishments and measuring them against her own, Toby concludes, “You haven't made a piece in nearly a decade. Your time is running out. Dear Dick, we are not far from your doorstep.” Indeed, Toby's art goes viral when she sits naked for hours in the oil rig campsite outside of town to draw attention to the rape of the earth.
Expanding Chris's story beyond her own to those of other women in Marfa, I Love Dick highlights the struggles women face to be seen, to have their desire, as well as their art, appear when male desire permeates everything and is seemingly everywhere. One of the challenges presented here is to overcome shame, take an active stance, and occupy the position of the male gaze without hesitation, risking fear of failure, refusal, and rejection. This is not just a simple inversion: we see with Paula, with Toby, and with Devon (as we see with Chris) that desire is transformed and changes by the voicing and visibility of its active presence. I Love Dick shows what desire can do when women aspire to own it, to follow it wherever it leads. This, in spite of complex and compromised gender politics (the permeation of female desire by male fantasies) that have heretofore situated women as white bubbles: objects, passive, lack personified.
We get several examples from Soloway of what desire can do, in light and in spite of its impurity, the contamination by male fantasy and power. In the ending sequence of images for the pilot episode of I Love Dick, we see Dick from behind as he strips naked and submerges into a pool. Is this Chris's fantasy—watching Dick secretly, and from behind? Is it Dick's fear/fantasy—the abyss of woman? Or is it both—the saturation of Chris's fantasy by male fears? Irigaray admits that though in the male sexual imaginary, the woman is only an obliging prop for male fantasies, “that she may find pleasure in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain” ([Reference Irigaray and Porter1977] Reference Irigaray and Porter1985b, 25; emphasis added). The pool is, at one and the same time, the wetness, the infinity, the circularity, inclination, not-one-ness of women's desire, and also the “dark gulf ready to swallow him [man] … a maternal darkness” of “a cave, an abyss, hell.” These words are Beauvoir's in The Second Sex describing the way men think of the “mystery” and “magic” of Woman (Beauvoir [Reference de Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier1949] Reference de Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 166). Man wants to “break the barriers of the self and comingle with water, earth, night, Nothingness, with the Whole” (167). That is Woman's danger, but also her appeal: while she condemns man to finitude, she also “enables him to surpass his own limits” (167). Beauvoir elaborates, “in all civilizations and still today, she inspires horror in man: the horror of his own carnal contingence that he projects on her” (167). Women are trapped by carnal contingence with menstruation as its reminder and remainder: unclean, impure, and cursed. We will come back to menstrual blood and to wetness.
For now, we note that like the dark red stain of menstrual blood, desire is active, not passive, and especially so in this case. Taking the form of an epistolary outburst, Chris's desire bleeds out all over the town, interrupting Dick's and seeping into everyone else's veins, too. The first time we see Chris writing—the creative act that becomes the funnel for her desire, the products of which undo both Sylvère (he is embarrassed by his wife's excessive behavior) and Dick (who is made the muse), but not Chris, because instead her writing saves her, redeems her, fortifies her and makes her courageous—she is up in the middle of the night composing her first letter to Dick. In later episodes, we see these letters nailed to fences, taped to walls and windows. Chris's actions literally paper over Dick's gaze, which has heretofore dominated and structured the aesthetic of the town. Chris's desire leaves a searing mark: it disrupts, upends, threatens to destroy; it transforms everything, and particularly the women of Marfa.
Its first appearance, the beginning of what will become an avalanche of letters, occurs as Chris sits on the couch, writing on her laptop. Sylvère gets out of bed and asks Chris what she is doing, to which she responds dismissively, quickly, curtly, hoping he will return to bed so that she can get back to her project. She says she is writing a short story in the form of a letter and that it is fiction. Sylvère urges her to read it out loud. She finally relents, begins to read, and Sylvère becomes erect. He says “Look at this!” pointing to his crotch and calling attention to the easy visibility of male desire. If Breillat were filming this, we would see the penis. We do not see Chris's desire, were that even possible, so we cannot know whether Chris is aroused or not, what she is thinking or feeling. When Sylvère jumps on the couch, onto and into Chris, he triumphantly declares that she is “so wet,” as if this were his doing. But Chris's wetness is more likely the result of her own letter writing, rather than a response to Sylvère's erection. (We will see in the last episode with Dick when Chris and Dick finally attempt to have sex, that Dick, too, finds Chris “so wet,” but he, also, is not the reason for her wetness.) Sylvère and Chris have a quick fuck, their sexual “dry” spell is over, and maybe Chris is tamed, returned to passivity? No. She returns not to passivity, but to her laptop! She continues writing her fantasy, revisiting and rewriting the previous night's real events when she, Chris, and Sylvère were at a restaurant together and Dick blithely dismissed her filmmaking, her presence, her contributions not only to the conversation but also to art. In real life, Dick's indifference was staggering. Chris made a hasty retreat to the “lady's” room. But in Chris's revised fantasy version, when Chris abruptly leaves the dinner table, Dick follows her into the bathroom, where she is waiting for him like a “stupid girl.”
“Waiting for him like a stupid girl.” This line, paired with what we know from Breillat's films, demands a reading of the outsized role that male fantasies and female masochism play in the fantasy worlds of women. Beauvoir notes (critically) that Freud concludes, “woman is masochistic because pleasure and pain in her are linked through defloration and birth, and because she consents to her passive role” ([Reference de Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier1949] Reference de Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 411). In response, Beauvoir debunks the idea that pain is always linked to destruction (it is also linked to the desire to merge, she says) and dismisses the notion that pain plays a larger role in women's erotic life than it does in men's. Beauvoir also cautions us about seeing women's masochistic fantasies as the “truth” of what women really want. “We have seen that most of the time the young girl accepts in her imagination the domination of a demigod, a hero, a male, but it is only a narcissistic game. She is in no way disposed to submit to the carnal expression of this authority in reality” (412). She adds, “The little girl who dreams of rape with a mixture of horror and complicity does not desire to be raped, and the event, if it occurred would be a loathsome catastrophe” (412). We are thus cautioned to note that although fantasies inform what counts as real, and though they permeate our bodies, condition our feelings, and organize our politics, there is another reality we could find and confirm were we to acknowledge women's desires. This is feminist realism.
We also might think about what desire in I Love Dick can do when we take yet another approach. Rather than re-police the lines between fantasy and the real, between masochism and sexual submission (another line Beauvoir draws, seeing sexual submission as occurring between equal partners), we can consider which kinds of sex and which feelings are expected from romantic fantasies and what happens when different feelings emerge instead. Romance, for example (also, we remember, Romance is the title of Breillat's film) is a good example of what Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant1998) calls an “institution of intimacy”: it is accompanied by certain scripts, an aesthetic appearance, expected emotions and feelings. By showing, indeed embracing, female masochism and humiliation, Romance and I Love Dick challenge the expected script and the expected feelings that are supposed to accompany romance. In a bondage scene in Romance, Marie finds herself enjoying the manipulation and placing of her body by her unattractive boss and they laugh and joke together.
Marie's masochism, much like Chris's willingness to humiliate herself and embrace that humiliation, are examples of the way women's fantasies, even if they seemingly follow the stage set by men, subvert from within. Marie does not experience the rom-com brand of romance with her partner Paul, and she subsequently violates patriarchy's script by seeking out feelings and experiences that must be disavowed or contained by the usual heterosexual romance. Chris humiliates herself all over Marfa and simply does not care. Breillat's and Soloway's characters follow patriarchy's rules by participating in humiliation, pain, and masochism, but they do so in comedic and excessive ways and invite us spectators to the party. They embrace pleasures that disrupt and upend, they find pleasure in unexpected places and they are willing to follow wherever it leads them. They are masters of the feminist cringe! Whether this desire seems excessive, fantastical, real, or all three simultaneously may well entirely depend on how spectators are situated.
To say that women's fantasies subvert from within is to pay attention not to what desire is, or what exactly it looks like or represents, but instead to what it does no matter what it is, where it comes from, or to what it is attached. Although Marie's desire looks to some like a masochist fantasy, it is (dare I say, in reality?) much more than this. Marie's erotic encounters, which, as noted earlier, include sex with a stranger, a hookup in a stairwell that ends in rape, and, finally, S&M lessons from her boss, move her, transform her, and remake her vision of herself and the possibilities that she sees for her own future. In the end, she will face the future alone with her child, which might, for some, be interpreted as a warning. But the film precludes this interpretation by staging Marie's journey as toward liberation, showing that men have set the stage (as Irigaray would notice) throughout the entire film, but they will do so no more. The rules can change; they are not set in stone. When the film opens, we see Paul, Marie's boyfriend, a male model, “acting” the part of the dominant man as matador. At one and the same time, we see how male dominance is staged (a female model, posing with Paul, is told to “be a bit submissive to the man”) and its fragility. It is all an act! Later on, when Marie is with her boss, Robert, who gags her, positions her body, and arouses her with his fingers in her vagina, again our attention is drawn to a man, in this case a man who is much more attentive to Marie's responses and needs, but who is still the master of the stage. Nevertheless, it is Marie's response, what her sexual arousal can do, that changes the scene and the trajectory of Marie's life. Marie's response, her arousal and her surprise at her arousal, moves her away from passivity and toward a desire for self-fulfillment. It is not insignificant that after her encounter with Robert, Marie changes from her characteristic white costume into a red dress and we see her out to dinner with Robert delighting in food and conversation. She is smiling, laughing, enjoying herself. The future is uncertain. What comes after patriarchy?
At the end of the film, Marie, pregnant with Paul's baby, calls Robert when she needs to go to the hospital, leaves the gas on in her apartment, and blows up the place with Paul inside. In a hilarious last scene, we see Marie and her baby at Paul's funeral. She clearly does not feel the least bit guilty! She revels in her decisions, in her newfound freedom. We hear Marie's thoughts: “They say a woman isn't a woman until she creates life.” Marie has both created and taken life; she is the master of the stage! “If someone up there counts souls, we're even,” she concludes. She is a single mother in need of no man: this is a fantasy of feminist realism. It calls out to spectators to see the present anew and create a different future.
Likewise, the end of I Love Dick emphasizes female desire, women's bodies, their pleasure and potential. This is what women can do, these two works seem to say. Marie creates life, she prevails, she moves forward without a man, and she wins the game! In the final scene of I Love Dick, Chris seems about to have her fantasy fulfilled as she and Dick are about to have sex. As noted earlier, Dick says to Chris, “you are so wet,” and he demands that Chris tell him it is he who makes her wet. He inserts his fingers into her vagina and pulls them out. Contra Brinkema, we do not see “wet female desire.” Instead, we see menstrual blood. Dick's fingers are covered with it. He looks at the blood, horrified, while Chris tries to remember what day it is to gauge whether she is late or early.Footnote 9 Dick hastily retreats to the kitchen to wash his hands clean; we see the blood run down the drain as he scrubs. Alone, Chris looks in the mirror and seems to take stock of the situation. She dresses, gathers her things, puts Dick's cowboy hat on her head, and walks out of Dick's house into the sunset. As blood runs down her thigh, Chris holds her head high.
FEMINIST POLITICS
Can a feminism willing to embrace women's fantasies that evoke the irruptive and interruptive affect/effect of feminist laughter move us forward? This is a somatic feminism that acknowledges that the comportment, sensations, projections, fluids, and psycho/mind articulations of the body, and of bodies encountering other bodies, is the source of all politics, all political relationships. As Beauvoir so vividly depicts in The Second Sex, it is male fear of the body, of contingency, of filth, of mortality, of nature, and of nothingness, that fuels men's anxiety, their horror, their ugly refusal of, and hence desire to control, women's bodies and their powers and potential. In one especially compelling passage, she writes,
[Man] considers himself a fallen god: his curse is to have fallen from a luminous and orderly heaven into the chaotic obscurity of the mother's womb. He desires to see himself in this fire, this active and pure breath, and it is woman who imprisons him in the mud of the earth. He would like himself to be a necessary as pure Idea, as One, All, absolute Spirit; and he finds himself enclosed in a limited body, in a place and time he did not choose, to which he was not called, useless, awkward, absurd. His very being is carnal contingence to which he is subjected in his isolation, in his unjustifiable gratuitousness. It also dooms him to death. This quivering gelatin that forms in the womb (the womb, secret and sealed like a tomb) is too reminiscent of the soft viscosity of carrion for him to not turn from it with a shudder. … This envelope in which the fetus is formed is the sign of its dependence; in annihilating it, the individual is able to detach himself from the living magma and realize himself as an autonomous being. ([1949] 2011, 164–65)
Beauvoir goes on at some length about the “spontaneous embarrassment,” the “spontaneous repulsion” at the “pregnant woman's stomach,” the “swollen breasts of the wet nurse” (164–65). Spectators are witnesses to the physical cringe from Dick when he sees his fingers covered with Chris's menstrual blood.
This denial of the body, the pinning of all bodily contingency and meaning onto women is, for Beauvoir, the source of a tragic and misguided politics that also denies ambiguity—the encounter of self and other within one's self, the simultaneous existence of object and subject, our two-ness. Contra Irigaray, Beauvoir insists that men, too, are a sex “which is not one,” but men work really hard at denying that fact. But we know from Irigaray that women cannot deny it, have not denied it, and women's fantasies acknowledge it. Is it possible that women's multiple and contaminated desire can be a start for rejecting the kind of deluded thinking that any of us might be the sex (the race, the age, the category) that is one? Can the “resurgence, the recall of a heterogeneity capable of reworking the principle of its authority” (Irigaray [Reference Irigaray and Gill1974] Reference Irigaray and Gill1985a, 50) be the nothingness, or the pregnant absence, the “other” of the one, from which something new can be born?
Exemplary of feminism's cinematic realisms based in real sex from women's perspectives, I Love Dick and its predecessor Romance appeal to spectators through the look of female desire: its capture between male and female fantasy worlds, its everyday refusal or blithe dismissal, its stubborn persistence, its comedic (existentialist, absurdist, hilarious) effect, and its bodily affect (the irruption of laughter and the cringe). Feminism's realisms help us see that fantasy saturates and situates what we count as real and that women's experiences are often delegitimized as not real (as mired in fantasy). As we know from Irigaray and Beauvoir (and our experience), male fantasies structure the rules of the game, not only of sex but also of politics. Dick, as key example, is the alpha male and artist hero who dominates all of Marfa (apart from a small space outside of town where Devon, inspired by Chris's letters, gathers her friends to rehearse her play). As we learn in episode 5, Dick's gaze permeates the desires of all the women in town, not just Chris's; it is his attention they all want. But when Chris arrives in town, she interrupts Dick's desire with her own, writing letters and papering Marfa with them. Doing so, she not only interrupts but refashions the look of desire for the women of Marfa and for spectators, too. I Love Dick makes us laugh, makes us cringe, but more importantly, it does feminist work: it makes us feel less alone in our experience and shifts our attention to the possibility of something else. As I noted earlier, thinking about the women of Marfa, Chris asks in one letter, “Dear Dick, What if we all started writing you letters?”
A key aesthetic strategy for making-real, making-possible, making-a-future is the use of comedy in the letters as a political weapon. This is one key way of addressing patriarchy, sending a letter even though the address, and even the addressee, is not certain. With these comedic letters, we evoke the laughter of recognition, of revenge, of familiar feeling: a powerful tonic. Onscreen, spectators see Marie and Chris using weapons, too, and making it real. These weapons show how powerful the cringe and laughter can be, once let loose, once they become contagious. Turning on the gas to kill her boyfriend as she begins childbirth, Marie seizes the power to both take and create life at the end of Romance. She lets out a hearty laugh at her boyfriend's grave. In I Love Dick, Chris walks off into the Texas sunset with blood running down her legs to embrace an uncertain but new future, leaving the disappointing Dick behind.Footnote 10 Chris smiles. The death of patriarchy! That's a happy ending for real.
If we all started writing Dick letters, if we all addressed patriarchy in this way, could we move toward this heterotopic gynocentric future? This site, space, or holding place for desire, does not promise to be uncontaminated or pure. Nevertheless, here equality, nondominance, democratic multiplicity, and nonsovereignty have a chance to survive, maybe flourish. This is the promise that I detect in Soloway's aesthetic vision. The ending of the series is suffused with pure joy: Paula plans to fill the gallery with the work of feminist and black artists, Devon gathers the men of Marfa to dance a ritual of healing and love, Toby's body art video protesting drilling and pillage in Texas oil towns has gone viral with more than half a million views. Dick's erect-brick artwork is broken, it has lost its rectitude as well as its verticality, and the women are moving to new places. It will likely not be a linear journey. It is a fantasy, but maybe, through feminist community, we could make it real. The open secret of Chris's letters to Dick is that they were not really, in the end, received by Dick. They were received by the women of Marfa. Though Dick was presumably the intended recipient, the letters were circulated, read, and their message made material, made political, by other women.
Feminist cringe comedies evoke the cringe as we are uncomfortably reminded that our desire is not one and certainly not pure. Together we laugh at the absurdity but also the possibilities of such a situation. This is a discomforting laughter—but it is the laughter that marks a new day; the laughter that echoes that of the medusa, who always gets the last laugh. With her, we laugh too. Dear Dick, The Joke Is On You.
